This paper explores the challenges of creating and maintaining trust in a global virtual team whose members transcend time, space, and culture. The challenges are highlighted by integrating recent literature on work teams, computer-mediated communication groups, cross-cultural communication, and interpersonal and organizational trust. To explore these challenges empirically, we report on a seri...

Global software development projects use virtual teams, which are primarily linked through computer and telecommunications technologies across national boundaries. Global Virtual Teams rarely meet in a faceto-face context and thus face challenging problems not associated with traditional co-located teams. To understand the complex issues in a virtual project environment during the requirements ...

Although globalization has been a political and economic concern for centuries (see Distributed Work, reviewed below) its impact on the engineering education community has become particularly salient since the publication of the Engineer of 2020 (NAE, 2003), Educating the Engineer of 2020 (NAE, 2005) and The World is Flat (Friedman, 2005). These and subsequent publications have emphasized the c...

Outsourcing is changing the decision-making environment. Tasks are becoming distributed and geographically dispersed. Groups must make decisions in a virtual environment. Virtual group collaboration efforts are quite different than face-to-face groups. Virtual group dynamics can be simulated from virtual groups used in web-based education (WBE). Both environments have many common elements. Expe...

Global virtual teams are internationally distributed groups of people with an organizational mandate to make or implement decisions with international components and implications. They are typically assigned tasks that are strategically important and highly complex. They rarely meet in person, conducting almost all of their interaction and decision making using communications technology. Althou...

The growing utilization of global virtual teams with members of different cultural backgrounds necessitates investigating whether the performance of culturally diverse virtual teams would differ from the performance of culturally homogeneous ones. Conflict management styles have been found to be of crucial importance for the success of virtual teams. This research-in-progress paper advances a m...

In this paper we investigate collaboration within global virtual project teams. Our objective is to understand the practice of virtual teams to determine conditions needed in order to integrate groupware in such a context. The research question explored is: What are the conditions for integrating groupware technology in collaborative practice within virtual teams? Investigating this question we...

Despite the differences between virtual and collocated teams, empirical studies have identified a number of challenges that virtual teams experience. We argue, in this work-in-progress study, that habits constitute a good explanatory factor for understanding behaviour in the virtual team environment. In this study, we analyse ‘offline’ habits in the cases of student-based global virtual teams a...

As the nature of work in today's organizations becomes more complex, dynamic, and global, there has been an increasing emphasis on far-flung, distributed, virtual teams as organizing units of work. Despite their growing prevalence, relatively little is known about this new form of work unit. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework to focus research toward understanding v...